...Blair Inc. Francis Beckett, David Hencke and Nick Kochan London: John Blake, 2015, £20.00, h/b O ne of the two reported contributions Tony Blair made to Labour's 2015 election campaign was a speech in support of the European Union. In April the former leader said: 'The referendum will, for the first time since we joined Europe after years of trying unsuccessfully to do so, put exit on the agenda.’ Most Britons were not electors in 1975 and so have never had a say on what was then the Common Market and is now the European Union. This perceived illegitimacy was acknowledged by the Conservatives, Greens and UKIP who all offered voters on ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 50) Winter 2005/6 Last| Contents| Next Issue 50 The Blairs and their Court Francis Beckett and David Hencke London: Aurum Press, 2004, £18.99, h/b John Newsinger According to Beckett and Hencke, in the late 1980s Nigel Lawson could never understand why Tony Blair was a member of the Labour Party rather than of the Conservative Party. This question subsequently occurred to a growing number of Labour Party members and the answer they came up with saw tens of thousands of them becoming ex-Labour Party members. More important, of course was not why Blair himself was a member of the Labour Party but how someone so ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 52) Winter 2006/7 Last| Contents| Next Issue 52 Yo, Blair! The unspeakable Martin Kettle of The Guardian is a political journalist who has been pretty close to, and supportive of, New Labour since the 1990s. His article 'The special relationship that squandered a noble cause' (27 May 2006) opened with this: 'The long arc of Tony Blair's rise and decline has been punctuated by journeys to Washington. He went there first with Gordon Brown in January 1993...' Which is wrong, of course. As was reported in The Observer, Blair first went to Washington in 1986( [1] ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 43) Summer 2002 Last| Contents| Next Issue 43 Blair and Israel In January 1994, three months before John Smith's death, the then shadow Home Secretary Tony Blair, with wife Cherie Booth, went on a trip to Israel at the Israeli government's expense- a trip, incidentally, neither the Sopel nor Rentoul biographies of Blair mentioned. (1) Blair had always been sympathetic to Israel, had shared chambers with Board of Deputies of British Jews President Eldred Tabachnik, (2) and had joined the Labour Friends of Israel on becoming an MP. Two months after returning from Israel, Tony Blair was introduced to Michael Levy at ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 48) Winter 2004 Last| Contents| Next Issue 48 Our leader Simon Matthews Blair Anthony Seldon London: Free Press (Simon& Shuster), 2004, h/b, £20 What a tome! At 755 pages, with 40 chapters and 3000 plus footnotes, the book is neatly divided into chapters on either specific historical periods or significant individuals. The picture that emerges of Blair is striking in its variance from much of his public image but not necessarily to his disadvantage. He is a rather more mundane figure than the PR machine would have us believe. Early Blair The PM had no great connection with the Labour Party ( ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 45) Summer 2003 Last| Contents| Next Issue 45 Harassing Robert Henderson In 1997 Robert Henderson, a retired civil servant, wrote to the then leader of the Opposition Tony Blair to ask for his help. Eventually he wrote a dozen or so letters to Blair and Cherie Booth. Blair then tried to have him prosecuted but the legal authorities refused to act. Blair or someone close to him then set the tabloids on him and he was smeared in the Daily Mirror (also used to smear the journalist Greg Palast) and Daily Record as a stalker and a racist. This was discussed in Lobsters 37 and 39 and 43 and Henderson's ...

... in with lucrative publishing deals and get their version of history into print as quickly as possible. Thus has the demise of Labour in May 2010 been marked. The accounts that have appeared include the absurdly self-centred, stating-the-obvious-at-all- times tales of Peter Mandelson; the fantastic, optimistic and daytime TV-oriented (and thus immensely popular) narrative of Tony Blair; Jonathan Powell's treatise on Machiavellianism; and the diarised compendium of sad little stories from Chris Mullin, as he crept away from the political stage after 2005. A particularly interesting work, though, is that written by Deborah Mattinson, a major courtier to New Labour and an observer of many of its foibles and obsessions over 15 years.1 ...

... foreign policy by Mark Curtis could not be better timed. With more than a million Britons on the streets of London protesting against the Iraq war earlier this year there is a potentially large audience for a critical review of what led this country to that invasion. Even his title, Web of Deceit, catches the growing public perception of Tony Blair in leading the country into war on a false prospectus. Coming after The Ambiguities of Power in 1995 and The Great Deception in 1998, this is Curtis's third trawl through government documents from the perspective of those at the receiving end of British foreign policy. In the earlier two he dug beneath the Cold War double talk and obfuscation of ...

... Confessions of a Labour loyalist Sailing Close To The Wind: Reminiscences Dennis Skinner and Kevin Maguire London: Quercus, £20.00, h/b In his extremely useful memoir of the Blair government, Adam Boulton notes that the unlikely figure of Dennis Skinner had been 'recruited into Blair's big tent'. He goes on to comment on how Skinner 'had been surprisingly cuddly towards his middle-class leader throughout Blair's years '.1 Mark Seddon, the former editor of Tribune, also comments in his memoir on Skinner's 'good relationship with Blair, who would actually have him round to Downing Street on a regular basis '.2 He was less impressed when he learned that Skinner 'regularly reported back from the NEC to ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 53) Summer 2007 Last| Contents| Next Issue 53 Blairusconi: populism and elite rule Mike Small Tony Blair will be remembered not just for the slaughter in Iraq, and the subsequent collapse of Labour in Scotland in face of a resurgent SNP, but as the Labour leader who could have forged common links across Europe but chose to side with one of the continent's most despised figures. Charles Clarke, one of the last in a long line of damaged ministerial casualties, articulated this clearly when he broke ranks after being ejected from the Cabinet. Clarke, a Europhile, stated: 'The relationships with many of the European countries are really not ...